The Cromies, the Jacks and Nicole

Roy Peterson’s honours included the Order of Canada.

Photograph by: Ian Smith
, Vancouver Sun

Working at a daily newspaper is en ephemeral business. Yesterday’s front page story is cast aside for the latest news, and more often than not, reporters and photographers are forgotten by the masses after they leave the paper.

Still, there are several people whose legacy at The Vancouver Sun transcends their era. At the top of the list would be Robert Cromie, who rescued The Sun from bankruptcy in 1917.

Cromie had no newspaper experience when he took control of the paper, which had suffered during the recession that hit the city during the First World War. But he made all the right moves to turn the paper around.

After borrowing money from the publisher of the Seattle Times, he bought out the rival News Advertiser (in 1917) and Vancouver World (in 1924) to increase circulation. In 1926, he pulled a switcheroo with the rival evening Star, swapping press times to turn the morning Sun into an evening paper with a circulation of 56,000 — five times the circulation when he took it over.

Cromie was a savvy promoter. When a new building or business opened, he would produce a special page or section marking the occasion, securing lots of ads in the process.

But he was just as interested in the editorial side of the paper as he was in the business side. Cromie was a crusading publisher whose newspaper fought for an equalization of grain rates from Vancouver and championed health crazes such as fasting and an orange juice diet. He travelled widely, wrote pamphlets on world events, and befriended many of the big names of his day, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Amelia Earhart.

Cromie died in 1936 at 48, but his family continued to run The Sun until 1964. His son Don Cromie was at the helm when The Vancouver Sun passed The Province to become Vancouver’s biggest paper in 1947.

DON CROMIE

Don Cromie was somewhat eccentric: whatever struck his fancy, staff had to do. The most outrageous Cromie missive came in 1957, when he sent the photo department up to the skies over Vancouver in a DC-3 passenger airplane to try to photograph the Russian Sputnik satellite.

“It was very hard dealing with him — you never really knew what he’d do next,” former Sun editor Alex MacGillivray recalled when Cromie died in 1993. “He would have made a beautiful king.”

But he loved newspapers, and his tenure is seen as the golden era of the paper.

It was during the Don Cromie era that The Sun produced many of its greatest columnists, such as the two Jacks: Scott and Wasserman.

JACK SCOTT

Flipping through the Jack Scott photo file is a gas. He was constantly on the move, whether it was loading his wife and kids into a woody wagon for a cross-Canada drive or flying down to Bolivia to check out llamas.

The caption for the llama photo reads “Sturdy Jack finds thin air of Bolivia a bit hard to take but he summons strength to snap a picture of one of the strange creatures of the mountains.”

In another photo, a bare-chested Jack blows a horn in mountainous terrain while a woman reaches out to him, like Tarzan and Jane.

He looks like a movie star in a 1954 head shot, save for one detail; he has a lit smoke in his right hand.

Scott’s Our Town column anchored what they called the second front page in the late 1940s and 1950s.

He was often sent overseas to cover the top news stories of the era, but his column was folksy and informal, stories of his family, friends and his city.

When Scott died in 1980, one-time Sun writer Pierre Berton called him “the most graceful writer I have known.”

JACK WASSERMAN

Jack Wasserman was arguably the most popular columnist in Vancouver Sun history. He wasn’t a natural writer like Scott, but in the 1950s and ’60s Wasserman was essential reading if you wanted to find out what was happening in the city’s nightlife.

Every night Wasserman would roam through Vancouver’s nightclubs and restaurants in search of tidbits. When he came up short, he’d pay his Sun colleagues a buck an item to flesh out his column.

Through Wasserman, readers felt like they’d been at the Cave, the Marco Polo, or the Palomar ’til the wee small hours, hanging with the stars. San Francisco had Herb Caen; Vancouver had Jack Wasserman.

Wasserman was a showman to the end, dying from a heart attack while giving a speech at a roast for forest tycoon Gordon Gibson. The audience laughed, thinking it was a gag.

Years of being The Sun’s hard-living “saloon writer” had taken its toll: Wasserman was only 50 when he died. The city honoured his memory by renaming a two-block strip of Hornby Street Wasserman’s Beat, because that’s where he plied his trade in long-gone clubs.

Denny started off in the Sun sports section. He made stars of local businessmen such as Murray (The Pez) Pezim and Nelson Skalbania, wrote lovely paeans to new potatoes, and composed great eulogies to people, even if he didn’t like them. Denny’s column on Erwin Swangard is a perfect example.

“[Swangard] was a holy terror to work for, demanding, often unreasonable, occasionally mean,” he wrote. “He used to plow through the newsroom like a ship of the line, battle ensigns flying, all guns brought to bear, Captain Swangard at the helm and people would shake. He got so mad at me one day that he forgot my name and, in front of everyone, called me ‘Sonny.’ Sonny! For God’s sakes, I was the father of five ... Yet, when I was going through a personal crisis, he couldn’t have been kinder, making money and time and tolerance available. Daddy Swangard, taking care of one of his kids.”

'EDITH ADAMS'

The longest-running Sun columnist was Edith Adams, who dispensed recipes and household hints from 1924 to 1999 — three-quarters of a century.

The catch was, there was no Edith Adams. It was a fictitious name conjured up by The Sun for a column on the features or “women’s” pages. It was initially called Edith Adam’s Cookery Page, and proved so popular, The Sun started publishing Edith Adam’s Prize Winners Cook Books, filled with recipes sent in from readers.

The names of the women who wrote the columns in the 1920s and ’30s are lost, but in the 1940s, Marianne Pearson Linnell, Myrtle Patterson Gregory and Eileen Norman all contributed. In 1947, The Sun opened up Edith Adams’ Cottage, where readers could watch Miss Adams (Linnell) cook up recipes, then buy the cookbooks. The women also took questions by phone.

ROY PETERSON

The Sun has a history of having excellent editorial cartoonists, including the great Roy Peterson, winner of a record seven National Newspaper Awards. Peterson was a fabulous artist with a wry wit that sliced and diced politicians from the 1960s to today.

One of his favourite subjects was the late Social Credit Premier W.A.C. Bennett. In a 1965 cartoon, he pictures Wacky as a superhero flying through the skies. It reads “Faster than a speeding Highways Minister, mightier than the Columbia River, able to expropriate tall buildings in a single bound — Leaping Leftists! Look! Up in the air ... IT’S DYNAMAN!”

ALLAN FOTHERINGHAM

Peterson once did a book with his friend, Allan Fotheringham, and illustrated the covers of many of Fotheringham’s books. The Foth became a national figure with his column in Maclean’s magazine, but in the 1960s and ’70s he was The Vancouver Sun’s ace political columnist.

Fotheringham became so nationally prominent he has his own Wikipedia entry, which claims he coined the term Lotus Land for British Columbia.

NICOLE PARTON

Nicole Parton never made the panel of the old CBC quiz show Front Page Challenge like Fotheringham, but she was one of The Sun’s fixtures in the ’70s and ’80s. Her consumer column was syndicated across Canada, and her books of household tips, Nicole Parton’s Answer Book and Nicole Parton’s Helpful Hints, became bestsellers.

Her Helpful Hints column was made up of reader tips, which she normally tested before putting them in print. But one day she got a household tip from a friend of her mother’s in Houston, Texas and put it straight in. The tip was to throw ammonia and bleach in with your laundry, to make it come out sparkling clean. This may be true, but it’s also a formula for creating mustard gas, a lethal weapon that killed thousands of soldiers in the First World War.

Luckily, her column didn’t kill anyone: a chemistry professor in Ottawa came across her ammonia/bleach tip early the next morning.

“He read my column, and the moment he did his eyes popped out of his head,” Parton recalls. “He began frantically calling the Ottawa Citizen, finally got hold of someone and explained to them that I had basically created mustard gas. It wasn’t exactly mustard gas, but it was highly lethal.

“The Ottawa Citizen responded [immediately]. You know that old term ‘STOP THE PRESSES!!!’, they did. They ripped every newspaper off the press. It gets far worse. They went to every single door step, and removed every paper they could find.... They removed every paper from every box in the city and up-country.”

Ottawa then phoned the papers that carried her column across Canada. “I went to work that morning totally unsuspecting, and the first thing that happened was I was called into the editor’s office,” she recounts. “He was pretty darn mad.”

THE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is supposed to be a Top-10 list, which means I’m running out of room. Unfortunately, this means there is no space to talk about past greats such as Barry Broadfoot, Don Hunter, Jim Kearney, Archie McDonald, Barry Mather, Paul St. Pierre and Marjorie Nichols, let alone more recent stalwarts such as Vaughn Palmer, Lloyd Dykk, Daphne Bramham, David Baines or Kim Bolan. So we’ll end it with a nod to The Sun’s photographers.

Ralph Bower snapped an incredible shot of W.A.C. Bennett checking out B-movie star Mamie Van Doren’s cleavage. Peter Battistoni talked Joe Strummer of the Clash into posing beside a tank at the Beatty Street armory. Ken Oakes took a dazzling shot of the neon jungle of Granville Street in 1964; 45 years later, Mark Van Manen did a gorgeous shot of the new neon sign for the Pennsylvania Hotel.

Ian Lindsay’s beautiful photos for a feature I did on the Marine Building could be a book. Bill Keay took some of his amazing nature shots and did turn them into a book.

They are carrying on a tradition laid down by past greats like Brian Kent, Ray Allan and Bill Dennett. Near as I can tell, since the 1940s, The Sun’s photo department has been as good as any in the business.